Presently, pharmacies perform a number of different customer-specific services that may require storing and retrieval of specific customer-requested items. For example, pharmacies store and retrieve prescription containers and processed films for their customers.
While the pharmacies assist their customers with various personalized services, filling prescriptions remains a primary customer-specific service for the pharmacies. In particular, the pharmacies fill, stock and then retrieve prescription containers for their customers. Often, a pharmacy may have dozens and possibly hundreds of prescription containers stored in bins or depositories awaiting pick up by customers. Because of the multitude of prescription containers that are frequently stored at a single pharmacy location, pharmacies typically have difficulty storing and retrieving these containers easily and efficiently.
The prescription containers may be difficult to quickly retrieve because the prescription containers can be inadvertently placed in the wrong storage bin. Additionally, if a prescription container is misplaced and cannot be found, a pharmacist must refill the prescription, causing a delay in delivery to the customer. When the containers are lost, the pharmacy incurs additional costs to refill the prescription. In addition, the delay in delivering the prescription to the customer may negatively impact on customer relations. Therefore, misplaced and/or lost prescription containers are time consuming for the pharmacist technician and the customer, are costly for the pharmacy and detrimentally effect customer service and good will.
Additionally, current methods of prescription storage adversely affect the efficiency of the pharmacies. Many of the current methods of prescription storage are based on an alphabetical organizational system that, according to studies, is more difficult to utilize than a counterpart numerical based system. These studies have shown that people take longer to store and retrieve articles that have been organized alphabetically rather than numerically.
For these reasons, the current methods of alphabetically based prescription storage are not desirable. For example, most pharmacies stock and store prescriptions according to the last name of the customer. Thus, to stock and then retrieve the prescription from the bin in which it is stored, the pharmacist technician must search through the bins according to the alphabetical designations on the bin containers. Because, as discussed above, an alphabetical based system is intuitively more difficult, the pharmacist technician will often spend more time stocking and/or retrieving prescriptions.
Further, because the prescription containers are commonly put away according to an alphabetical designation associated with the name of the customer, some bins are overstocked while others are understocked. For example, because there may be many customers having last names beginning with letters such as, for example, “S” for Smith or “J” for Jones, the bins storing prescriptions for these letters may overflow with prescription containers. Similarly, because there may be very few customers having last names beginning with letters such as, for example, “X,” “Y” or “Z,” these bins may be relatively empty. For these reasons, the current methods of bin management result in bins that are mismanaged and disorganized.
Thus, there is a need for an alphanumerical based system and method for bin management to more accurately and efficiently store and retrieve filled prescription containers. Such a system and method will more evenly disperse the prescription containers throughout the available bins, save money typically lost on misplaced prescriptions and improve customer relations.
While the disclosure is susceptible to various modifications and alternative constructions, certain illustrative embodiments thereof have been shown in the drawings and will be described below in detail. It should be understood, however, that there is no intention to limit the disclosure to the specific forms disclosed, but on the contrary, the intention is to cover all modifications, alternative constructions and equivalents falling within the spirit and scope of the disclosure as defined by the appended claims.